Page 3 of You Had Me At Valentine

“Lyra.”

He takes a step forward but I fling up a hand to stop him as my brain does the thing I’ve been trying to prevent from happening.

It starts connecting dots.

Judy’s retiring.

Dad’s lawyer is suddenlyherein Kilt Valley, the place he left for greener pastures.

I have two missed calls from my father that I ignored because it’s my day off.

“Start talking,” I command Byron.

“Lachlan should have told you,” he says in the world’s worst case ofno duh. “I wasn’t expecting to walk into this situation, so you have my apologies for dropping this bomb on you.”

And the fact that he knows it is one makes it even worse somehow. My stomach heaves as if my rollercoaster car has just gone over the top of the first hill.

“That’swhat you want to apologize for?” I sound snarly. I, however, do not want to apologize for it. “Nothing else?”

Byron doesn’t bother to pretend he has no idea what I’m talking about. “Would it help?”

No. Not even a little bit.

But I’m not eighteen any longer, and neither is he. Only one of us is acting like an adult though.

And the longer I treat him like Public Enemy #1, the quicker he’s going to guess I never got over him. Though something tells me that ship has already sailed. Great.

I square my shoulders. “Okay, we got off on the wrong foot. Why don’t we start over. Why, Byron Hale, as I live and breathe. What are you doing in these parts?”

He lifts a brow, reminding me how he can turn utterly aristocratic in the blink of an eye. Goes with the name, though he’d tell you he hates sharing one with a poet.

“Lachlan wants us to work together to get the inn ready to sell. Is that going to be a problem for you?”

Big yes. Huge. I smile. “Only if you make it one.”

First order of business is to clear up this gargantuan misunderstanding where my father thinks he can sell Gran’s inn. I mean, technically it belongs to him under the MacLellan Properties umbrella. He has the legal right to do whatever he wants with it.

Morally, on the other hand, the inn ismine.

And I will work with the devil to sell it over my dead body.

Speaking of Satan, he wears glitter as well as he wears that five-thousand-dollar suit. No coat needed, apparently, despite the cold.

The Byron I knew used to wear ski pants with holes in the knees and sweaters with unraveling cuffs. This Byron is a far cry from that kid out of the low-rent part of town. This one looks like he’s never seen the business end of a ski pole and has zero issues with foreclosing on widows and orphans.

But I can’t stop the memories that flood back. Byron helping me hang Christmas lights in this very inn. Byron sneaking kisses behind the check-in desk. Byron promising we’d find a way to make our relationship work on a snowy night just like this one.

Byron breaking that promise, then my heart when he took off for college without a backward glance.

Now he’s back to take the last piece of my grandmother I have left.

He’ll have to fight me for it.

Two

Byron

The last time I saw glitter raining down on Lyra MacLellan, we were dancing at the Kilt Valley High Winter Ball. I’dspent the entire night trying to work up the courage to tell her how I felt.

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